


gaberdine | gaberwool

by the_garbage_will_do



Series: reyuxmas [3]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Tale of Thomas Burberry (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Angst, Emotional Infidelity, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21722848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: Hux unrolls a ream of cloth by hand, though he has a battalion of droids at his disposal. He measures out a black bolt and cuts it with one sharp swipe of his knife, and he takes up a handful of cold metal pins and sets them between his teeth. He approaches the bare mannequin in his hidden room.He begins the work.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Rey, Brief Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Series: reyuxmas [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1620592
Comments: 10
Kudos: 43
Collections: Reyuxmas 2019





	gaberdine | gaberwool

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [The Tale of Thomas Burberry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D5IZtDCS5c), a gorgeous Burberry ad starring Domhnall Gleeson. You don't need to watch it to understand the fic, but I still heartily recommend it 😍
> 
> Written for Week 3 of Reyuxmas on the theme of "tradition."

“Hux. A candle in front of curtains?”

“Phasma. They’re fireproofed curtains.”

“If your new dye works.”

One glance, and she surrenders the point.

“Is it an Arkanis tradition?” Phasma asks, turning away in retreat. “I’ve seen candles in windows all through the neighborhood.”

“They’re put out in the winter as a sign of hope. To light the way for travelers to your door.”

He says it with perfected apathy, as if reciting from a manual on performing cultural sensitivity. Phasma nods, takes up the prototype cape she came for and leaves his workshop without another word.

The door locks behind her.  


.

_“Here I thought you just did high fashion.”_

_One year ago, a new client paced his gallery. She flicked through his displays and rummaged through his neatly organized garment racks, with the focus of a scavenger pawing through garbage in want of a jewel._

_“The ‘avant-garde,’” she continued. At first her accent seemed the same as his, stilted and Imperial, yet there was a buoyant sunshine to her phrasing. “Live frogs on heads.”_

_“You’ve confused my brand with Rose Tico’s. At Hux, we do prefer our animals dead.”_

_She looked up from her scavenging, smiling impishly. That smile burst in his face like a thermal detonator._

_He answered her with a silent smirk of his own, just this side of proper, and watched her hone in on a bolt of gaberwool— a waterproof, fireproof, blasterproof fabric of his own invention._

_“What is this?” she asked, running loving fingers along the warp._

_“It’s what you’ve been looking for,” he said, and Rey laughed in reply._

_One spark, and all his world went up in flames._

.

Outside, Arkanis closes down for its winter holidays. All the surrounding factories have already shut down. Hux has kept his “troopers”— his employees— here later than the rest, but ultimately his intimidation is trumped by local labor law. His troopers are now mid-rebellion, streaming steadily out the front doors for their winter vacation.

Hux stays standing in his workshop. Though impeccably organized, it’s stuffed with equipment. On one side, he keeps a row of sewing machines and state-of-the-art fabric cutters with gleaming needles and blades. Beside them is a filing system— a library of his neatly cut patterns— and another row of mannequins, blaster practice targets now repurposed. On the opposite wall he’s pinned his battle plans for the next season, the next year, the next decade, silhouettes sketched in stark clean lines on grid paper. In between stands a team of droids, each specialized for sewing or draping or dyeing, each devoted solely to his commands.

He deactivates the droids one by one. At the end he stops by a table, leaning forward with his hands pressed to the cold hard surface, eyes resolutely focused away from the candle on the windowsill. After a moment he takes up a nearby ruler and toys with it, bending it within an inch of snapping.

The doors snap open behind him.

Hux doesn’t turn, still looking at his ruler. “Any news?”

“Not yet,” Finn replies, low and quiet. “Have you heard from Kylo?”

A break from tradition. Hux frowns. “He hasn’t filed the papers yet, if that’s your question.”

“Oh. And. When’s the last time you left your workshop? Or when will be the next time, maybe that’s a better question…”

After a stretch of silence, he leaves too. Hux waits for the click of the door sliding shut. Then he presses a button on the underside of the table. The third wall before him slides open to reveal a secret room. 

Inside wait five mannequins. One is still bare. The other four are outfitted in couture, in sequins and tulle and ruffles, in pure consuming black.

.

_Rey explained herself briskly. She was a scavenger-turned-explorer, baked hard in the sands of Jakku, tested in the jungles of Ajan Kloss and on the salt of Crait. He knew the facts from the news. It was the reality of her that stunned him. She was brassier than he had imagined, and far smaller too._

_“So now I’m off to a mapping expedition on Ilum.”_

_“Ilum,” he said. “In the Unknown Regions? With a Jedi Temple and enough kyber for multiple armies?”_

_“You know your Imperial history,” she observed._

_He tipped his head in acknowledgement._

_“The primary danger comes from the cold,” she continued. “A secondary threat is its volcanic activity, which manifests primarily as geysers—”_

_“So burns and toxin exposure?”_

_“And there’s the usual risks from mountainous terrain, so I need a no-nonsense wardrobe to stop the entire planet from killing me,” she finished. “Are you my man?”_

_“Entirely.”_

_._

Hux has twenty current projects under his supervision, in desperate need of correction this winter. The critics call the Hux fashion house a fortress, and they complain that he viciously reconditions his workers like soldiers until they align with his vision. A true accusation, but he prefers to take it as a compliment. They are his soldiers, and he is their general, and he cannot let them down. The gravity of the role demands his efficiency, his ruthless devotion to their singular cause. 

According to his datapad, he has twenty current projects in need of his urgent attention.

He switches off the device. He unrolls a ream of cloth by hand, though he has a battalion of droids at his disposal. He measures out a black bolt and cuts it with one sharp swipe of his knife, and he takes up a handful of cold metal pins and sets them between his teeth. He approaches the bare mannequin in his hidden room. He begins to work.

.

_“How do you want the outer garments to look?” Hux asked Rey. His lips scarcely formed the words, all his attention drawn by his hands on her waist when fitting her undershirt._

_“White.”_

_“Just...white?”_

_“It’s a solo expedition, not a runway show!”_

_He imagined it— what he might do if he had her in a runway show. He had dressed royalty, princesses and queens across the galaxy and none could compare to her, none would compare to her when he was done. A whole world unfurled itself in his imagination—_

_“What would you have me wear?” she asked, with that scavenger’s curiosity._

_Pure white. A modest train for the gown. A lace veil._

_“Black,” he said aloud. “Something frightening and sleek and impractical in every way.”_

_She laughed again. “When I come back, you can pitch something to me and I might wear it, but_ no promises.”

_Then Kylo— still unambiguously his husband, still reliable and steady and always in the next room over— walked in for no reason Hux could discern and broke into their conversation. “He’ll outsource it. He never does any of the high fashion work himself anymore, did you know that?”_

_“I just made you that coat,” Hux protests._

_“With epaulettes. Who puts epaulettes on coats outside a kriffing army?”_

_“They had a practical usage, you could pin your gloves on them—”_

_“And it had more flaps,” Kylo said, steamrolling over him, “and more buttons than the average ship cockpit—”_

_Rey laughed harder than ever before._

_“So you’re Hux’s new explorer,” Kylo said with that broad easy smile he still wore._

_“That I am.”_

_Kylo threw one glance at Hux— the dangerous kind, the did-you-forget-I’m-a-skilled-telepath kind— but it dissolved in an instant. Hux looked and looked at Rey in front of him and Kylo just behind, and the whole world dissolved into a golden glow._

_._

Hux misplaces a pin, and a curl of fabric falls to brush the floor.

He rips the metal out of the mannequin like he’s pulling the pin of a grenade. He rips all the fabric off next and condemns it to his growing scrap heap and collapses against the wall of sketches, careless of how they’re wrinkling.

He has twenty other projects to consider. He has to sign off on the collection for Coruscant Fashion Week and the entire spring ready-to-wear line. He’s added constraints this season, played them off as eccentric genius. All boxy plaids. All hard angles. Nothing he can honestly call beautiful. 

Not a single garment can go free of black.

.

_Hux hated her ship. He threatened to have it banned from his grounds, undeserving wreck that it was. Rey freely agreed it was a piece of trash and then teased that she was in no position to judge, being an undeserving wreck herself. He could only laugh. If he dared protest that she deserved the galaxy, he might never stop._

_“I renamed the ship,” she had announced just before her departure to Ilum._

_“To ‘Garbage’?”_

_“Close. I named it ‘Hux.’”_

_He scowled._

_“What,” she said with perfect innocence, “you don’t want the free publicity?”_

_“Is this a campaign to pressure me into rebuilding the entire damn thing so I’m not embarrassed by it?”_

_“Oh, I don’t need your funding,” she answered. “Taking your name is enough for me.”_

_He began a witty retort and tumbled off mid-way, reduced to staring. With a scavenger’s rabid hunger, she stared back._

_._

He came from war. Arkanis had pulled him off the front lines to redesign their troops’ armor, and he had wholly flung himself into the task. He knew how it felt when armor failed, when shrapnel worked its way through a chink, through to tender skin.

He came from war and in truth never left, and he had approached Rey’s outfits like armor, leaving not an inch unconsidered. He tucked in pockets. He remade the belts until they could hold thrice her weight when grappling. He built in defenses and redundancies. At her request, he fitted in beacons to report her vital signs, sewing them snugly into the hems. 

He worked with military precision, the ruthless utilitarianism of a man possessed. He had paced his workshop for days on end, grasped by a life-or-death drive, by prodigious insight or perhaps grim foresight.

Now he cuts a sloppy new swath of fabric, returns to the lifeless mannequin, and flings black cloth over the head.

.

_“Hi, Armit— Mr.— Hux?” Finn knocked on Hux’s workshop door, back in those blessed days when they had never once spoken face to face._

_“You’re the one who referred Rey to me?” Hux said, rising to shake his hand. “If you’re wanting a raise for that, I’ll see what I can—”_

_“No,” he said, frozen with his hand in Hux’s, and that was the first warning sign. He knew what he paid his employees; they should have been desperate for raises at all times._

_“No,” Finn repeated, retracting his hand and wiping it on his trousers, tongue darting nervously between his lips. “It’s Rey. Her beacon’s gone dead.”_

_"Dead."_

_“They say maybe an electrical storm shorted out the signal and…”_

_Finn’s voice faded into static. Hux’s world was nothing but flames._

_._

He looks at the mannequin, now cloaked head to toe in black like some grim phantom. He turns to glance at the candle he’s inexplicably left burning.

.

_Hux called up honorable rescuers and bounty hunters alike, and he promised a prize to anyone who returned her alive. He promised to design a lifetime’s worth of clothes, to forge armor of beskar or to just hand over his own fortune, whatever it took. He imagined a whole world where he commanded an army he could order out into the galaxy, devoted to the singular purpose of saving her._

_Finn knocked on his door each night._

_“Any news?”_

_“Not yet.”_

_It became their tradition._

_._

He tears himself from the candle and works like mad, with an imprecise recklessness of extravagant proportions. He slashes wildly with his knife, careless of his own fingers. Without any pattern to guide him, he carves out the parts of a rippling black skirt and a black cloak so sheer it couldn’t keep anyone warm. He hacks together a belt with no utility but to dramatize a silhouette. He flings the knife away and runs his hands down the cold metal of the mannequin and imagines a whole world, imagines _his_ whole world still between his hands.

.

_Hux sent out his makeshift army and returned to the work. He worked and he met his deadlines and he hunched over his sewing machine and he hurled his sewing machine from the window. He slashed up his mannequins and he sketched out his battle plans and he tore up his sketches and he watched them flutter down like flurries of snow and he nearly reached for his half-built jet pack and sent his whole useless empty workshop up in flames—_

_Kylo loomed in the doorway, surveying a scene of destruction that under usual circumstances would have been his own doing._

_“Do you love her?”_

_Hux wheeled around, ready to do battle, only to be shattered once more by his telepath’s stare._

_“I never meant to.”_

_“I know.”_

_“But,” he gasped, “I never stopped loving you. Please, Kylo, you can see it in my head, no please Kylo don’t go—”_

_Kylo strode out of his workshop, the rhythmic clank of his boots echoing all through the factory. From the window he watched Kylo leave, storming across the grounds with the black cape Hux had designed flowing behind him, with the black cowl Hux had hand-woven fluttering in the wind._

_._

The stab of Hux’s sewing machine echoes through his empty workshop. He builds, from rulers and needles and pins. He sews up his seams and tries to sew up the scraps of a world in tatters.

.

_There had been another, in the month after Kylo left too. A pilot approached him, a man set on flying all through the galaxy in a tin can of a ship. A daredevil with a swagger in his step and sex in his coalfire eyes._

_Too forward during a fitting, Hux had lifted his hands to cup the pilot’s cheeks. Then a wisp flashed white in the corner of his vision. He looked and saw only a ghost._

_“I forgot,” Dameron murmured as he stared, stricken white. “Married man.”_

_“...Yes.”_

_“You got an oath. I respect that.”_

_Hux dropped his hands with a curt nod and completed the fitting, brisk and impersonal, as if all he mourned was a marriage vow hanging on a technicality, as if all his heart wasn’t shot through with shrapnel._

.

The black is gorgeous.

Hux steps back to inspect his creation, a gown and a cloak all in black, blessed with an elusive softness rarely seen in his work. It surpasses the outfits on the other four hidden mannequins. It would stop the show at any fashion week in the galaxy. He wishes it could be worn some day. 

Outside his snow-dusted window, all of Arkanis lights its candles and opens its doors for guests and sits down to a winter banquet. He stands in an empty workshop, in an empty locked-up factory, and presses his hand against his mouth. As he presses back tears, he hears the bell ringing at the back entrance of the factory, the one leading to his personal quarters. Most likely some local carolers have seen the candle and approached. He ignores them and wills them to leave him alone. 

The doorbell rings again.

He clenches his fist, striving not to explode at children who only want to bring him holiday cheer. Switching on the intercom, he barks out a curt, “Yes?”

“Armitage.”

“...Kylo.”

He drops onto a chair, drained entirely of energy. He knew this day would come, he’s not one to deny the inevitable, but he thought he might preserve the illusion of hope at least through the holidays.

“It occurs to me,” Kylo says, painfully slow in an even more awkward manner than usual, “that you might have misunderstood me slightly. When I left. Without any explanation at all.”

Though Hux tries to laugh, it catches like a sob. “Your message was clear.”

“I just wanted to get you a holiday present. That’s all.”

Hux rubs his forehead, brushing back the hair that somehow escaped its gel. 

“I’ve never heard divorce forms called a present,” he sighs. “Or perhaps you’ve just brought a nice thermal detonator to put me out of my misery?”

“In a manner of speaking,” says another voice— with a stilted Imperial accent, shot through with buoyant sunshine.

“Happy holidays,” Ben declares, his broad smug smile audible even through the intercom.

Hux rises slowly, elegantly, and checks himself in the mirror. He straightens his vest. He smooths back his hair. He lifts the candle, still burning strong in its elegant silver holder, that it might light his way.

He runs to fling open the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Now has a [moodboard on tumblr](https://chekovs-turbolaser.tumblr.com/post/189581832329/gaberdine-gaberwool-a-crossover-with-the-tale)!


End file.
